Rabbit Head: A Spicy Specialty

BEIJING — Bundled up on a wind-whipped day, about 30 people lined up outside a restaurant takeout window here, waiting for rabbit heads.

For guests in the main dining room, a video explained how to eat the fist-size heads. Su Yong, the restaurant’s enthusiastic chef and star of the video, demonstrated by pulling open the rabbit’s mouth and separating the jaw from the skull before splitting the jawbone in two and sucking off the succulent meat. In case there was any confusion, brochures with diagrams rested on each table.

Mr. Su is a sort of rabbit head evangelist, drawing celebrities to his restaurant, Old Street Rabbit, to help drum up crowds. He holds aloft one half of a tiny jawbone, explaining that it can be employed as a pick, and then uses the incisor to scoop out an eye, window to the bunny’s soul.

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A rabbit head in spicy peppercorn sauce at Old Street Rabbit restaurant in Beijing.Credit
Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

Food fashions come and go, but perhaps the oddest and most obscure can be found in China. Scorpions and dogs made comebacks after the long culinary dry spell of the Mao years. Eating animal heads, preferably heavily spiced, is the latest repast to enjoy a growth in popularity. This isn’t novelty food; rather, it’s much-loved local street food with deep cultural roots, which has spread from the provinces into China’s biggest cities.

Few things throw the differences between cultures into such stark relief as what people eat. Frogs and snails in France, offal-and-oat-stuffed stomachs in Scotland, pigs’ feet in Germany — latter-day Americans have long made fun of the specialties served by their European cousins. But in China, cat and rat and donkey penis can give the American palate pause.

Or even some Chinese palates. Thanks to China’s decades-long economic boom, the increasingly cosmopolitan, educated and urban-bred young are drifting away from their rustic culinary roots. But that same boom is driving a culinary revival, with chefs rediscovering dishes that hadn’t been seen for decades. Franchising, licensing and outright copycatting, meanwhile, have spread many regional specialties to the cities.

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Eating the rabbit heads can be messy; plastic gloves help.Credit
Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

No one can pinpoint when the Chinese took a liking to eating animal heads. It began, no doubt, as peasant food. Meat was a rare and expensive treat, so people developed a taste for the bits that wealthier classes discarded. This, coupled with repeated famine, accounts for most of what Westerners regard as the odder dishes on Chinese menus. (Of course, people eat animal heads elsewhere, but they generally are rendered unrecognizable before they are delivered to the table.)

While pig heads, goat heads and even dog heads are eaten in China, the reigning triumvirate is fish, duck and rabbit, each of which has restaurants devoted to its preparation.

Fish heads have the longest history and widest acceptance, at least in part because they don’t come from mammals. Restaurants offer regional seasonings ranging from the heavy soy-based sauces typical of China’s northeast, to the fiery spices popular in Hunan and Sichuan provinces, to the milder ginger and scallion flavors common to the southern coast. These aren’t narrow, bony fish faces, but the big, meaty front ends of fathead carp, which offer plenty to eat. One head is enough for two people.

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Yiping Yuxiang in Beijing specializes in duck heads.Credit
Sim Chi Yin for The New York Times

Eating rabbit head, meanwhile, is a messy business, so much so that some diners are supplied with aprons and plastic gloves. Anecdotal accounts credit a woman named Chen from a suburb of the provincial Sichuan capital of Chengdu with popularizing spicy rabbit head in the 1990s, much as a pocked-face woman named Chen from a Chengdu suburb popularized spicy tofu (the now-ubiquitous mapo doufu) earlier in the century.

The more-recent Mrs. Chen, a factory worker in the Chengdu suburb of Shuangliu, opened a small hot-pot restaurant to supplement her income, and one day dropped some of the rabbit heads that her son loved to eat into the spicy soup. What came out has been called “old mother rabbit head” ever since.

So popular was the dish that she named her restaurant Old Mother Rabbit Head. It is now one of the most famous rabbit-head establishments in Sichuan. Imitators sprang up around the country, prompting the restaurant to put up a sign stating that it is the “one and only” Old Mother Rabbit Head restaurant and warning that there are no branches.

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Brochures with diagrams on how to eat a rabbit head are placed on tables at Old Street Rabbit restaurant in downtown Beijing. Instructions are: 1. Pull head apart. 2. Pull apart again. Eat the tongue first and then the cheeks. 3. Bite the back part of the skull and pull it upward to open the skull. Eat the rabbit brain. 4. Pick out the eyes with a finger or chopstick.

Mr. Su, the chef at the Old Street Rabbit restaurant in Beijing, said that he learned to cook rabbit head with Old Mother Chen herself, now in her 70s. A rabbit head connoisseur if ever there was one, Mr. Su says his restaurant serves 3,000 rabbit heads a day.

But rabbit heads are a niche dish compared with the popularity of duck heads, which spread from the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the spicy heads are a local specialty. Duck-head restaurants range from full-service tablecloth establishments to simple shops where beer and a bowl of split duck skulls are the main fare. The chefs of Pang Xijing, who wears faux Chanel earrings and a fake-fur-collar parka, dish up 300 heads a day from the stark storefront furnished with red vinyl booths.

Ms. Pang buys cases of frozen heads from a local market, then has her chefs thaw them under running water for six hours to leach them of “bad smells” before simmering them in a spicy soup. The heads are split lengthwise and stir-fried in a mixture of dry herbs and spices. A bowl of seven heads costs 62 yuan, or about $10.

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What does it all taste like? Fish heads are not fishy, but small bones abound. The brain and the eye, which some regard as treats, are acquired tastes. Rabbit heads, meanwhile, come in two flavors: numbingly hot and seasoned with five spices. The meat — predictably — tastes like the dark meat of chicken. The eyes, brain, tongue and soft palate, which are presented by Mr. Su as the most delectable morsels, are more about texture than taste.

Duck heads might be the most appealing to a Western palate. Eating one is not unlike eating a super spicy chicken wing (except for the beak and that accusing eye).

And for those who can’t decide, the signature snack in Quzhou, a town south of Shanghai, is “three heads, one foot,” or a rabbit head, a duck head and a fish head served on one plate with two goose feet.

A version of this article appears in print on April 17, 2013, on Page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: When Dinner Has a Gleam in Its Eye. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe